


Breathe

by JustAnotherGhostwriter



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: F/M, Gen, Tw: Animorphs, post-war fic, slight changes to the timeline between the last battle and the suicide mission aboard the Rachel, tw inside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 11:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAnotherGhostwriter/pseuds/JustAnotherGhostwriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's just another very late night for Marco, until the phone rings and he can no longer pretend his ties to the war are completely severed. He wants to forget, but his help is needed and it concerns his best friend... </p><p>Small post-war fic centering around Marco, Cassie and Jake based on Anna Nalick's Breathe (2AM).</p><p>T for swears and mentions of adult themes - more comprehensive warnings that contain spoilers inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: These contain spoilers. Tw: mentions of possible abortion. 
> 
> Once again I am ignoring the pile of work I have in order to write fanfiction. Good Student Award! This was posted on Tumblr for the Marco, Cassie and Jake appreciation months. All three of them....? 
> 
> Yeah I don’t actually know wtf this is. Word vomit. It’s all just procrastination word vomit.
> 
> I do know that it’s AU in the sense that the time between Earth being saved and Ax going missing has been extended by a few years so that extra shit can happen. I also know it’s heavily based on Breathe (2 AM) by Anna Nalick. I’ve hit another songfic streak, it seems. You should all be heading toward that blacklist button around now. At least I didn’t actually put any of the lyrics in, for this one.
> 
> [Part of the Great Fic Dump From Tumblr of 2013]

The TV was on so loud, Marco almost didn’t hear the phone ringing. Luckily the sound of uproarious laughing died down to near-silence for a moment that was long enough to let the shrill sound register. Marco glanced at his watch – imported from Switzerland, one-of-a-kind – first before grinning slyly and pausing his movie. It was the early hours of the morning; the only people who called him at that hour were fans who had somehow found his private line through dubious methods. And fans who were that eager to get to his personal number were fans who were eager for just about _anything_ : his favourite people when he was feeling the reality of a huge, empty house and what it had cost him.

2AM was when these girls started their nights. He didn’t mind the schedule: sleep was something he’d grown out of, just like his childhood and his innocence.

“Now how, exactly, did you manage to get this number?” he asked huskily, picking up the phone as he stretched across his couch luxuriously, already planning what he would change into.

“Marco?”

His smile slipped at once. The voice was female, but it did not belong to one of his fans. In fact, he was pretty sure she _hated_ him, in a way he could not blame her. “Cassie?”

“Yeah.” They hadn’t so much as exchanged an email in almost three years. Of course he’d given her his private number when he’d had it installed. She’d just never used it. “Listen I… Marco, I need your help.”

He’d heard and produced enough fake tears over the past years to know instantly what the real thing sounded like in a person’s voice. “What can I do you for?” It wasn’t that Cassie crying was something completely out of the ordinary; she’d always been the softest one of them all. But Cassie crying _to him_ was the anomaly that made his joking limited to the fake breeziness in his voice. They were not friends, any more; never _really_ had been. And that meant Cassie had a good reason for phoning.

Besides, he still owed her one. And if he could finally lay down his debts…

“I uh…” There was a deep inhale. “Um… I just… I need somebody right now who… who gets _everything_ and somebody who…” Another deep breath. “I need rationality, Marco. I need to know what point B is and how to get there. I need…”

“Ruthlessness?” His voice was mocking and a little sharp and he could imagine her wincing. There was a long, stretched silence and the slightly cruel need to hear her admit his choice in words was right vanished. “Tell Doctor Marco the problem, and he’ll find you the emotionally detached solution. In exchange, could you talk to Mother Nature and tell her that her raining on my last press date was not a nice thing to do?”

It was a desperate, clumsy attempt to get out of the dark waters he could feel approaching, but he had to do _something_ to try and stay dry and firmly in denial that everything was anything but perfect. Even though he knew it was futile: Cassie was the only true survivor of the lot of them. She’d managed to get out the best of all of them. She was _living_ even after the war she’d been through. If she was calling a guy she didn’t particularly like any more in the early hours of the morning with tears in her voice… Well. How was he supposed to hold on when the strongest was breaking?

“I… Can we not do this over the phone?”

A wide, bitter smile instantly stretched across Marco’s face. It had been five years since he’d last had to think about not speaking about things to Cassie over a phone. “Do I have to meet you in your parents’ barn instead?”

She caught on, and the hollow laughter made his insides twist. “Why don’t I just come to you?”

His eyebrow raised. “It’s a two hour flight.”

“Fifteen minute drive, actually,” Cassie replied quietly. There was a loaded pause. “I was going to call earlier. Much earlier. But…”

“Right.” He understood that perfectly well. “I’ll turn on the driveway lights for you, then.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don’t say that until you hear what I have to say,” he murmured back. “And pick me up a bagel on the way?”

****

The sunlight slanted through the open window at just the right angle to hit Marco square in the eyes. It was annoying, but he did not lift a hand to shield himself. Getting hit in the face meant that he literally could not see the other occupants in the room. And if he could not see them, he could not see how they turned to stare at him and the girl packed tightly to his side. He and Cassie were both used to the limelight, of course, but it had never been anything like what they were experiencing right then. Marco longed to make a lewd, inappropriate joke that would loosen Cassie’s rigid, frightened stance and give the other women and men in the room _some_ sort of right to glare at them so accusingly.

“Hypocrites,” he muttered to Cassie instead, pulling a face at the nearest woman who was frowning at them as though they were about to kill her puppy. “Like they’re just here for the free condoms or something.”

Cassie didn’t laugh and he found himself glancing at her. She was twisting her hands together tightly, her forehead puckered in a way he knew meant she was trying not to cry. It didn’t take her intuition to read her: she was scared and lost and guilty and hopeless. But also very determined: she’d been the one to suggest this place. She’d been the one behind the wheel of the car. Cassie had called him asking him to discover point B and the way to get there, but the truth was she’d chosen her point B long before she’d come to him. She’d just needed him to provide her with a couple of excuses that could stave away her natural personality so she could end up at said point B.

She’d come to him because she’d known what he’d tell her to do. He was her scapegoat, in a lot of ways, and while it stung and made him want to sneer at her and throw back all those things she’d said about him and his _ruthlessness_ he also… couldn’t walk away. They’d only ever had two things in common, but a war to save humanity and a boy who traded his humanity for the sake of the world made some pretty indestructible glue.

“The press won’t get wind of this.” Cassie wasn’t reassuring _him_ : her words were for herself. He had no doubt she’d said the same thing in her head over and over like a mantra. “The staff are bound by law. And the others here…” She glanced at some of the eyes that poked her with daggers laced with accusations. “Their word won’t hold up if both of us flat-out deny it.”

The sarcastic response that _of course_ it’ll all work out that simple and easy leapt to his tongue, but he swallowed it down and instead simply smirked mockingly. He had his ways to get out of this. She did not. With her words ringing fresh in his mind, Marco glanced at the other occupants of the room and mused on how funny it was that these people with such different point A’s all ended up at the same point B. There were those truly innocent: grabbed in their homes or cars or around street corners or taken by surprise after something was put in their drink. There were those who thought ‘yes’ was really the key to making him stay. There were those who forgot to be careful _just one time_ and were granted with nature’s blessing at a time they couldn’t afford to have it.

And then there was Cassie. Cassie, who was dropped right out of the heat of war into the freezing cold reality of peace in a world scrabbling to understand what she’d been living for three years. Reality was a cold, harsh winter from the get go; there was no such thing as an autumn period where she could start to let go of the war and brace herself for what lay ahead. In a situation like that, who could blame her for obeying instinct and looking for somebody to keep her warm and protected against the winter frost? That was, after all, all that Ronnie was. (Had been?) She’d spoken to him for hours about it all, pouring out more detail than he’d necessarily wanted just to get it off her chest. And while there was nothing but truth in her words that she didn’t even have the time to have a _dog_ with her busy life and her and Ronnie taking a break while they tried to figure out how they were going to proceed with their lives each so strongly on their own paths, ‘too soon’ was not the whole reason she sat on a hard plastic chair beside him.

Most of the reason was because Ronnie was ‘kind’, ‘caring’, ‘understanding’, ‘mature’, ‘supportive’, ‘funny’, ‘patient’, ‘so like her’ and ‘somebody she cared so, so, _so_ deeply about’ as well as a hundred other descriptions her quivering mouth had poured out as she sat on his couch. Ronnie had every good word attached to him except the one that really mattered: love. He was the very best thing for her, and she knew it, but things had stopped being simple eight years ago. There were always two conflicting sides to the story. Always two equal evils one had to balance. This was the only way out she saw, and it was also the worst possible thing she could imagine doing. Ronnie was her everything, but she didn’t love him.

There just weren’t words in human’s language that could explain that sort of thing. Marco understood that, just like she’d needed him to.

They were called and led down a hall, to a room too shiny and smelling of disinfectant. Cassie was placed on a soft chair and was told she’d be given another ten minutes to think things through completely alone before the doctor came in and asked her for her final decision. Marco was told to leave. He didn’t need thoughtspeak to hear the pleas she was sending him in her head. Cassie was a being of emotion and love and he was a being that could give true rationality by turning the emotions _off_. She needed him to give her pure, cruel fact so that she could be given balance. She needed a calm head to really think in those ten minutes, not simply come apart under her own guilt.

 _I need you to be cruel_ she’d begged earlier in the morning, pleading for the harshest truth she’d flown two hours to gain. He saw the same plea in her eyes as he hesitated at the door, and conjured up the lowest thing he could think of. To give her balance.

His shrug was blasé, his words emotionless. “What’s one more life after all the others you’ve taken?”

He shut himself down to the reactions, shut the door on the sight of her cradling her head in her hands and walked back to the waiting room. Without her shaking at his side he found it easy to flirt with one of the girls waiting. Marco lost track of time completely. It could have been only ten minutes; it could have been the hour they’d been told he’d have to wait should she decide to go through with it. He only snapped back to reality when she emerged at his side, eyes red but head high.

She told him nothing but, “Thank you.”

He asked her nothing except, “Do you need me to book you a flight home?”

*****

Cassie’s visit was a week-old memory when Marco found himself staring down at his phone once more. It was even earlier in the morning, this time, but he knew that should he call the phone would be picked up. None of them slept any more. Especially not Jake.

In the beginning, the thought to tell Jake about Cassie and the choice she might have made had never crossed his mind. Not even once. Cassie hadn’t even asked him not to say anything: it was sort of just understood that he would not. After all, Cassie and Marco were never more united than in the times they worked together to make sure Jake stayed safe.

How badly they’d failed.

Marco remembered the last time he’d seen his _best friend_ face-to-face. He’d flown down to Fort Bliss on his private plane, loaded with booze to help Jake celebrate his birthday. He was told, upon arrival, that Jake hadn’t attended any of the classes he was supposed to lecture or any of the meetings. The rest of the base was under the impression he was taking a nice day off for himself as a present. Marco knew better. He almost considered morphing so he could mow down the door to Jake’s room when knocking and yelling proved fruitless, but in the end found an open window that suited his human form just fine. He found Jake beside the bed, a bottle clutched in his hand and every day of the last eight years etched into his eyes like tallies.

“Well. At least that’s legal, now,” Marco had said, gesturing to the alcohol in Jake’s fist. “Happy twenty-first, Big Jake. What do you want to do first?” His voice had been flat; he was not stupid enough to think that the half-hope he’d had that Jake would be okay enough to do a birthday was still alive.

“It’s just another day, Marco. Doesn’t make a difference.” Jake had taken another swing of the beer, and Marco had sneered at the cliché statement. He’d thought Jake’s depression would be a little bit more original than “every day is just another day”, at least.

And he told his best friend so. Jake didn’t react. Didn’t even look at him. Just continued swinging back beer. It was almost like his father all over again. He should have seen the signs when Jake had first started on the illegal alcohol path.

“You’re going to finish that before I’ve started mine,” he’d tried once more, opening a bottle for himself and settling himself beside his friend. And then his eyes had caught the heap of empty bottles beside Jake’s bed and he’d _known_. The first time he and Jake had snuck alcohol Marco had just turned thirteen and he was mad at his father for forgetting, so he’d stolen some of his father’s whiskey. Neither of them had known how quickly it took effect, and as a result Marco learnt that Jake was a mellow, calm, humourous drunk. And drunk was now the only reason Jake was sitting calmly beside his friend instead of pulling himself to pieces.

“How long since you’ve been truly sober?”

Jake shrugged. “November last year? Maybe October.”

Remembering the mechanical hollowness to his words made Marco put the phone down and take a few steps away. Telling Jake about Cassie would not help anything. They he still loved her– that would go away only when the last etch of the war erased itself from Jake’s mind – but he knew just as well as Cassie did that Ronnie was her only chance at happiness and a real life. Once upon a time, Marco might have believed that finding out her and Ronnie were having problems would pull Jake back into himself so he could rush to Cassie and win her back. The bottles, piled high like dead bodies, told him that all it would do was hurt Jake more if he knew how far Cassie and her new boyfriend had gone.

About a million crude jokes jumped to mind, and he imagined an earlier time where he could have gotten Jake to laugh at some of them. In his mind’s eye he saw how the chain would have happened back then: he would have smiled, struck by the brilliance of his own humour. He would have gotten Jake to smile. And as soon as Jake let loose that smile of his that changed his face and made his eyes look younger, Cassie would start to smile too. She’d confessed once she found it beautiful when Jake smiled. Rachel would have been next (oh, fuck, he was thinking of her again he had to turn it off…) and Tobias and Ax would have followed her, smiling with their eyes in that creepy way that everybody seemed to understand. He wondered how many times those smiles had been based on lies and desperate hopes that one day they’d have something to smile a true smile about. He didn’t have to wonder to realize how the chain had broken: how links had gone missing until not even he could put on a fake one for the sake of the rest any more.

There had been so many sleepless nights spent pinpointing all the times a little bit of all of them had died. He knew almost exactly when Jake and Cassie had smiled last, respectively. And all those nights he’d found himself wishing they had kept the Time Matrix, just so he could give it to Jake and demand that his best friend _fucking fix it_. The last time they’d come into contact with the machine, Jake had died. But Jake was already _dead_ now, so what was the danger?

He’d mentioned it once; the desire to go back in time and change things had slipped from his lips when he’d been as drunk as Jake and propped up against his friend’s shoulder. Jake had told him no, almost at once.

“I’ll just make the same mistakes again, Marco,” he’d said quietly.

There was no way to argue with that. Every ‘mistake’ that had been made and that was still being made by the three of them had seemed, at the time, to be the best thing to do. Reason became unreasonable in a split second. No magic machine could change that.

Marco sat and put his head in his hands, forcing the memories and thoughts behind doors marked with fickle things like attractive women, fast cars and money. He shut up the nightmares and made himself angry at Jake and angry at Cassie and he made himself forget that every week he called to find out how many Red Tails had died in his home town.

In three different parts of the world, the three humans of earth’s only resistance that were left all gripped their hair and ordered themselves to simply make it to the next breath and take things from there.


End file.
